LegalFly is all-in on AI for in-house teams - and has big plans for 2026

LegalFly has quietly emerged as one of Europe’s most serious legal AI players, built not for law firms but for in-house teams drowning in contract review, compliance checks and repeatable legal work.

Founded in 2023 by a former Match Group product engineering team, the Belgium-headquartered startup has raised €17 million to date and is now preparing to kick off its next fundraise in the first part of 2026.

While far less capitalised than rivals like Harvey and Legora, LegalFly is betting that focus, security and customer retention will matter more than scale alone.

In a conversation with Non-Billable, CEO and co-founder Ruben Miessen set out why LegalFly is going all-in on enterprise legal teams, who he sees as his closest competitor, and why the UK market is a major focus for the company this year.

Built to unblock legal, not bypass it

Miessen’s founding insight came from an unexpected place: Tinder. Before LegalFly, the founding team worked as a product engineering unit inside Match Group, shipping AI features across the group’s brands.

That meant living close to the governance functions present in any large organisation. "One of those committees was the legal committee," Miessen says. "It was also the toughest one - next to security."

As the business grew, legal quickly became a bottleneck. "The legal bottleneck was quite intense," Miessen says. Over time, that pressure strained relationships. "Whenever they could bypass legal, they would."

LegalFly’s mission, he says, was to "build an AI solution that solves the legal bottleneck," while making legal work "much more collaborative within a large corporate organisation."

The team moved quickly. The founders left Match Group in April 2023, built an MVP within weeks, and ran a pilot with 25 law firms to stress-test the product with users.

The real proof point came in July. "If those firms want to keep their Legalfly access they had to pay for it," Miessen says - and most of them actually did. The company was formally incorporated shortly afterwards, and closed a seed round later that year, followed by a €15 million Series A in July 2024.

An enterprise-first product

LegalFly is laser-focused on who the product is for. "We’re obsessed with automating commodity legal work for in-house teams," Miessen says, including procurement, compliance, insurance and claims teams.

That focus shows up in the numbers. "96% of all of our clients are corporates or in the public sector," he says. "Only 4% are law firms."

The platform is an "AI-native workspace" with more than a dozen specialised agents that execute specific legal tasks end to end - from contract drafting and review to compliance checks, M&A due diligence and document anonymisation.

One of LegalFly’s core differentiators is anonymisation, to improve security. "We're the only one globally that is anonymising every single document before our agents process it," Miessen says. That makes sure sensitive data is removed before foundation models get access to it.

Competing with Harvey and Legora

Miessen is candid about the funding gap between his company and the legal AI platform frontrunners. Harvey announced a flurry of rounds last year, bringing its total funding to north of $1 billion, while Legora announced a $150 million round of its own in October. That has forced sharper positioning for LegalFly.

The company is aiming to become "the category leader in enterprise legal AI," while rivals are "generalist solutions" that are "leaning more heavily on the law firms," Miessen says.

Miessen sees UK-headquartered Wordsmith - also focused on in-house teams - as the company’s closest competitor. "From a product perspective, I would say that Wordsmith is the most direct competitor," he says, even though the two "surprisingly almost never meet" in deals.

Adoption is a services problem

One lesson Miessen says the company learned quickly is that enterprise adoption lives or dies on implementation. LegalFly has hired heavily into a legal engineering team made up of former lawyers from the likes of Freshfields and Slaughter and May.

"They’re maybe even the most important team at LegalFly today," Miessen says. Their role is to tailor workflows, build playbooks and configure custom agents before a client ever goes live. One example: taking a client’s "golden contract" and turning it into an enforceable playbook "in 20 seconds" - one that mimics and inherits the organisation’s legal style for that document type in that jurisdiction.

UK push and the next raise

After focusing initially on mainland Europe - and landing marquee customers like SAP and Lufthansa - the UK is now a major priority for LegalFly. Miessen says that the London team - originally built as a talent hub - is now being ramped up commercially "to be aggressive on grabbing market share."

Miessen declined to disclose ARR, but offered one data point: in 2025, LegalFly saw growth of over 800%. He acknowledges the company is "definitely smaller than Legora," but says it’s no longer "in the small numbers game."

The next fundraise is already in motion. "The plan is to by March prep it and then initiate it by April," he says, adding that the company expects to raise "in the same ballpark" as comparable rounds from larger legal AI players, without being drawn on valuation.

Churn, consolidation and scepticism about hype

Asked about the broader market, Miessen is wary of hypergrowth. He points to "a lot of rumours in the space in terms of churn" at some of the largest players, with "40-50%" churn not uncommon.

LegalFly, he says, is taking the opposite approach. "Our churn is below 5% across the entire portfolio," he says, arguing that sustainable growth will matter more as buyers become cautious.

On the push by Harvey and Legora towards more collaborative workspaces that connect law firms and their clients in real-time, Miessen is unconvinced the strategy is right for LegalFly. For commodity legal work, "it’s definitely not needed" to keep law firms in the loop.

Instead, he expects consolidation, tougher buyers, and fewer viable new entrants. "If you would have started LegalFly from scratch today, I don’t think we would have made it," he says. The bar has already moved, and in 2026, he expects it to move higher still. "Buyers already expect a certain maturity now."